Delivery, tone, and body language convey a lot to voters, almost as much as substance, political experts say.  During the next couple of weeks, voters will have the opportunity to watch the political posturing unfold. While most business leaders won’t find themselves in a one on one debate, there are lessons any executive can learn from presidential debates.

Brian Reisinger, a senior staff reporter at Nashville Business Journal, wrote an article about this very topic and he said lesson one is managing expectations. He goes on to offer three key ideas about managing expectations:

• If have  something rough to talk about do it quickly, but with candor.
• Don’t go too far. Promising something and delivering is where you ideally want to end up.
• Paying attention to how you say something is just as important as what you’re saying. People want to hear authenticity, empathy and other signs of high character when they’re hearing something.

John Baldoni of Forbes also wrote an article on lessons executives can apply when presenting an idea, arguing its merits, and fending off critics.

Know What You’re Talking About

Know the facts, but also know how to dole them out to make your argument. Don’t let the data speak for you. Nothing undercuts the legitimacy of a leader more than appearing to know what is going on.

Be Human

Business leaders have to strike a chord with their team that resonates beyond facts and image. Having a level head is important, but don’t take the burdens of leadership to the point where you aren’t relatable.

Remain Composed

It’s alright to show emotions, but balance and calmness are important. Baldoni refers to advice Amy Cuddy of the Harvard Business School offered on AC360 from CNN. She said to make certain your tone of voice matches your words. Look serious when you are on a serious topic. If you’re trying to be open and friendly, simply smile.

Think Quickly

Being able to think quickly on your feet is essential to being a great leader. Baldoni says response to a question you do not expect is an indication of how you will respond in tense situations.

According to Baldoni, following these lessons will help you present your ideas and yourself as competent, credible and confident. Perhaps you’d rather not take lessons from politicians, but take what you can from the successes and failures of public figures.

What leadership lessons did you see? 

Image: fekayliusvia Flickr, CC 2.0

Five Leadership Lessons from the Presidential Debate originally appeared on Peter Anthony on October 9, 2012.

Being a leader entails responsibility and respect plays an important role in being successful. Some think they are entitled to respect because of their position or experience, but you need to earn it rather than demand or expect it. If you have respect, your team will work harder and longer to help you reach your goals.

Kevin Daum of Inc. provides seven tips to help you be the leader who earns, not demands, respect:

Practice What You Preach

You will lack credibility if you say one thing and do another. Don’t be a hypocrite and practice what you preach. To earn respect, lead by example.

Be On Time

Keep all of your commitments. Being late shows a disregard for others. Time is valuable for successful people so take control of your calendar.

Communicate

Let your team know the best way to reach you. We are overloaded with ways to communicate from social media, to email, to text so limit your channels and respond within 24 hours if you want to appear communication worthy.

Be Right – Be Comfortable Being Wrong

Do your homework and state well thought-out facts. When information is too scarce to know for sure, take it as a qualified risk. If you’re wrong, own up to it, smile, and be glad you learned something.

Mistakes Will Happen

The Inc. article says if you aren’t erring, you are not trying. It also suggests setting an example for how to shake off a failure and bounce back. Encourage people to experiment and be creative in a safe environment. Know mistakes happen to everyone, even the smartest leaders.

Show Respect and Earn Respect

Earning respect isn’t a one-way street. Whether your team was wrong or right, show them the same respect that you expect from them. You have to give respect to get it.

Help Those Around You

Use active listening skills and really hear what people are saying. If a team member is struggling, provide the support they need. However, be careful. According to Daum, respect is lost when the boss placates habitual troublemakers at the expense of the team’s success. A good business leader knows when to support weak players and when to cut them loose when they aren’t pulling their weight.

To be an effective leader, one needs to earn trust and respect.  Respect is not something handed to you, but without it, it would be difficult to accomplish your goals.

What ways to you earn respect from your team?

Seven Tips for Auto Industry Leaders to Earn Respect originally appeared on Peter Anthony on October 4, 2012.

Mistakes are a part of life, but we can benefit from our mistakes and make the most of them, or we can run from them pretending they never happened.

Forbes recently published an article on how the smartest people convert mistakes and obstacles into opportunities. The author, Paul Brown, said, “People who succeed at work and in life treat everything they encounter – even if it is what you and I would call a mistake or a problem – as an opportunity.”

He offered three reasons for thinking this way:

The Good and Bad

You are going to find out eventually what people liked about your idea, and what they didn’t like. It’s better to learn sooner rather than later the good and bad about your product, before you sink any more money and/or resources into the idea.

Feedback

The feedback and market reaction could take you in a different direction or it could serve as a barrier to your competitors. Brown provides the example of an entrepreneur thinking of opening a restaurant, but a survey told him potential customers thought the area was already saturated. However, a few of said they would love a place that had a ready-to-go take out to heat up at home.  Since the entrepreneur was able to get feedback before opening the restaurant, he was able to avoid a mistake.

You Have Evidence

The feedback you receive provides you with evidence to get you ahead of the game. If someone else is thinking about doing something, such as opening a restaurant, you know something they don’t.

For instance, take a look at Coca-Cola. Pharmacist John Pemberton was trying to come up with a headache cure and general pain reliever. He began work on beverage combining coca leaves and cola nuts, but when his lab assistant accidentally mixed the concoction with carbonated water; the two men tasted it, liked it, and decided they might make a profit on it. They invented the beverage that became known to the world as Coca-Cola in a backyard kettle. In other words, they turned their mistake into a profitable opportunity.

Another example is when Chrysler rebranded the Sebring as the Chrysler 200. Chrysler was considered the U.S. automobile company most likely to collapse. They remained silent while Ford and GM tried to restore their images. They knew their ad needed to be different; something special that would make customers believe in Chrysler again and show they had a new and improved product.  They delivered in the 2011 Super Bowl ad. They offered something gritty, dark, and full of attitude. The ad is as much about Detroit as it is about the Chrysler 200. Their “Imported from Detroit” slogan resonated with an American audience who understood the trials of economic hardships. The ad gave people hope and Chrysler made the most of it. Chrysler saw some of its best sales months in 2011 since 2007.

We all make mistakes, but to move forward, we must learn from them. Take a page from the playbooks of Coca-Cola and Chrysler, and turn your mistakes into opportunities.

What’s the worst mistake you’ve made? Did you turn it into an opportunity?

Image: plindberg via Flickr, CC 2.0

How Auto Industry Leaders Can Turn Mistakes into Opportunities originally appeared on Peter Anthony on October 3, 2012.

Meetings are part of life for many people, and some people hate them. When you walk away not knowing what you were supposed to get out of it, or you were given a 40 page slideshow that lost your attention at slide 15, it feels like a waste of your time. Few people come prepared to participate and they aren’t as effective.

We came across some great statistics from an infographic by SalesCrunch.com, Don’t Suck at Meetings. (They even started a website, DontSuckAtMeetings.com, where people share the most awful meeting experiences they have had). A few statistics stuck out:

• After 30 minutes, participation drops to 73 percent, and after 45 minutes, only 64 percent are paying attention
• Ninety-two percent of attendees participate when guests do most of the talking
• The longer the slide deck, the less likely it will be read

The headline of an article on Open Forum caught our attention: How to Hold Meetings that Nobody Hates. It provides simple advice that is easy to follow.

Know What is Being Discussed

Communicate the point of the meeting and the topic to be discussed prior to the meeting. Instead of providing a memo for everyone to read, provide an agenda so you don’t lose focus and stay on course. This gives your team a heads up so they can make notes and contribute to the discussion.

Think Short

Set a time limit to ensure you are getting through all the points of the agenda. Meetings should last about 30 minutes so set a start and finish time and stick to it.

Ask Questions, Encourage Ideas, and Give Recognition

Build questions and discussion points into the agenda if you want engagement. Even though you’re running the meeting, your voice is not the only voice that should be heard. Meetings are also a good place to recognize your team for a job well done. Recognizing them motivates them to keep meeting their goals and getting their tasks complete.

Include People Who Need to Attend

If the topics of your meeting don’t apply to your entire team, then don’t hold a mandatory meeting for everyone. Keep meetings productive with smaller groups of only the people affected.

Meetings should be useful for your team so take the time to plan and prepare. Use them to make decisions, generate discussion and feedback, get new ideas rolling, and set a course of action.

What tips would you provide to keep your meeting from being boring?

Four Tips for Auto Industry Leaders to Hold Meetings that Don’t Suck originally appeared on Peter Anthony on October 2, 2012.

Did you know, constantly listening to a coworker complaining can actually undermine your work?

Listening to too much complaining is bad for your brain in multiple ways, according to Trevor Blake, author of Three Simple Steps: A Map To Success in Business and Life.

In Inc. magazine, Geoffrey James discussed how to turn workplace whiners into productive team members, and Sue Shellenbarger of the Wall Street Journal also offered tips on what to do with a workplace whiner.

Unfortunately, there are many people who would rather complain than take action.

Following are six ways to handle workplace whiners:

Schedule a Conversation

Don’t let a known office complainer interrupt what you’re doing. Let them know you want to hear what they have to say, but you can’t give the matter attention while your mind is on your current task. This will limit the affect the complainer has on your productivity and also conveys a willingness to listen.

Change the Subject

If scheduling a conversation doesn’t work, try changing the subject. Ask the complainer what is going well. Try and get them to focus on the positive instead of the negative.

Set an Agenda

Ask the complainer if they need solutions or they just need to vent for a while. According to James, asking the question, “As we discuss this, do you want me to suggest solutions or do you just need to vent for a while?” will do three things:

• It recognizes some people can’t begin to think about a solution until they have complained about the problem for a while.
• It establishes there is probably a solution to whatever the complaint is, even if it isn’t the right time to surface.
• It sets a time limit for the complaining, thereby making certain it doesn’t become a productivity-gobbling black hole.

Shellenbarger also advises to allot specific, limited amount of time in meetings for co-workers to air their complaints in a constructive context.

Listen

If you’re stuck listening you can do one of two things. Either imagine yourself in a peaceful setting you enjoy, or listen and communicate to the griper you’ve heard what they have to say. Don’t roll your eyes or check your email. Do nod your head. Complainers just want to be heard.

Ask a Question

Ask the complainer if they want your perspective. If they don’t want your perspective, that’s the end of the conversation. If they do want your perspective, phrase your advice from your own perspective by saying, “If I were in your situation, I would try…” If they start coming up with reasons it won’t work, all you have to do is let them know that is what YOU would do. Then end the conversation and get back to work.

Take Action

Getting distance between you and incessant grumblers may be the answer to your problem. Try moving your desk or workstation farther away, if you can. If you think it’s more of a serious problem, let their manager know. There may be mismatch between the complainer and their job. If that is the case, the only solution for both the complainer and the company is reassignment or termination.

Complaining can swiftly become incredibly annoying, so surround yourself with people who bring you up rather than break you down.

How do you deal with the office complainer?

Thanks to stock.xchng for the image

How to Deal With Workplace Whiners originally appeared on Peter Anthony on September 27, 2012.

As a business leader you are responsible for building an effective team. Leadership isn’t about what you can do for yourself, but what you can do for others. A good leader fosters relationships and nurtures them through trust and understanding.

A recent Forbes article by Mike Myatt offers a five day challenge to become a better leader and claims it will work for anyone in your value chain including peers, subordinates, customers, vendors, and partner. Here’s the challenge:

Day 1: Identify one relationship in need of improvement. Determine their needs, assess their positions, perceptions and opinions, and identify how you can help them. The goal isn’t to win, to prove how smart you are, to be vindicated, or to be right. The goal is to engage, to build trust and rapport, to reach an understanding, to move forward, and to become a better leader.

Day 2: Now comes the hard part…extend an invitation to meet in person - no phone calls, emails, DMs, or Facebook messages. Get face-to-face.

Day 3: Have a meeting, ask questions, process, and listen. Remember this is about them and not about you. Treat them like you’d want to be treated.

Day 4: Evaluate the meeting and the response of the person you met. Follow-up and follow through. Do what you said you would do. Close the gap, improve the relationship – LEAD.

Day 5:  Start the process over again with a different person.

In a recent Open Forum post, author Les McKeown offers three tips to grow both your own leadership skills and your business. Following are his three tips:

Stop Anticipating Answers

McKeown says we rely on our judgment and begin to distort the data we receive from others by sending hidden clues about what we want it to say. Our tone and the wording we use can nudge others to tell us what we want to hear, not the unadorned truth. He suggests an exercise to try: Identify one important thing you need to ask someone, strip your question down to its absolute basics without any emotion or presuppositions. When you strip your questions down, you’ll get higher-quality information in return. For example, instead of asking “I notice our subscriber rate collapsed immediately after we started the new advertising campaign.” Try “Why is our subscriber rate down 23 percent over the last month?”

Focus On Results

Start measuring your success by what you have achieved, not with the actions you took during a period of time. McKeown suggests setting clear, achievable goals for the coming month, and for 30 days, manage your daily activities in order to achieve those goals.

Be a Resource

Many leaders overlook being a resource for the people who work with and for them. They spend time pushing, checking, and reminding others to get things done. McKeown suggests identifying two people you work with most, scheduling a short 20 minute meeting, and ask them one question: What can I do to help you do your job better?

Whether you’re an entrepreneur or a CEO, you need to actively work on becoming a better leader. Leading is challenging, but simple changes can influence the results you get.

Can you achieve better leadership in just five days? What other tips would you add?

Three Ways to Achieve Better Leadership originally appeared on Peter Anthony on September 26, 2012.

The auto industry has slowly steered in to the world of social media marketing. For instance, Volkswagen and Toyota are using social media to encourage owners to share positive experiences about their brands. They have both been pushing the campaign via national television commercials.

The VW brand launched “Why VW” campaign on a social microsite. The ad campaign and the social hub are designed to encourage storytelling and spark conversations on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, and YouTube. As an incentive for participation, they periodically reward consumers with special perks such as event tickets or Volkswagen gear.

Toyota is using social media to reach Camry owners. They launched the “Camry Effect” about a year ago to debut the 2012 model. There were a few glitches in the beginning, but they figured it out and have married the Camry Effect site with its more traditional media. They are encouraging Camry owners to share their stories with other owners and have demonstrated they cared about these stories by featuring them prominently.

Both brands are enjoying rising U.S. sales. According to a Forbes article, VW had a 37 percent jump from the same period a year ago and Toyota is reporting a 30 percent increase through August.

Michael Scissions offered a few tips in an Ad Age article on how the auto industry can step up their use of social media to effectively improve and manage their messaging, engagement, and service with consumers.

Following are his three tips:

C-Suite Buy-In

Senior executives need to understand social media and how it aligns with business objectives. Scissions says the more interest and sophisticated understanding senior executives have of social media, the more the future of consumer interaction and service becomes a C-level conversation.

Cultural and Technology Changes

Dealers and sales networks should be activated to collaborate on, and initiate new, customer loyalty cycles. You also need the right integrations with existing customer-relations management systems, partner networks, and brand tracking systems.  In order to succeed, you need technology and services to extend from the top to the bottom and across the organization.

Measurement

Measuring the number of fans or followers is not going to cut it in the C-suite. The goals of social need to be aligned with business objectives and measured against key performance indicators. Scissions says, “Social management that can assign, track, and standardize metrics will allow the shift in focus toward long-term goals of message effectiveness, forecasting, and overall marketing optimization.”

These days, almost every company is seeking to capitalize off of social media, and why shouldn’t they? In many ways it is an extension of word of mouth and a powerful forum of advertising based on personal experience. It’s a place where we can reach an audience who may not have had our brands at the top of their minds.

Image: luc legacy via Flickr, CC 2.0

Three Ways the Auto Industry Can Step Up Its Social Media Use originally appeared on Peter Anthony on September 25, 2012.

Strong relationships have always been important in the workplace. As businesses become global and professionals work together across time zones, managing and maintaining workplace relationships has become challenging.

The manager-employee relationship has a critical affect on performance. Smart business leaders know if managers are trained and charged with responsibility for the success of their reports, departmental and organizational performance will take care of itself.

Companies that don’t drive home the importance of this relationship to frontline managers will eventually pay the price, whether it’s in the loss of good employees or decreases in performance resulting from employee dissatisfaction.

Ming Ong recently wrote an article on thoughtLeaders entitled “How to Find Balance Between Leadership and Management,” and it dives into how to build positive relationships. As business leaders and managers, we need to build and foster positive relationships with our employees.

Ong suggests four things to help build positive relationships:

Employee Awareness

Don’t just act interested, be interested. Ong suggests to keep in regular contact with your employees and really hear what they are doing as well as what they have on their plate. If you take a sincere interest in your employees, they will feel you are truly interested in them and they’ll be more dedicated to their work and the company’s success.

Accountability

Employees need to be held accountable for their tasks. For a group of employees to work together, they need to understand group and individual goals. Understanding shared and individual goals eliminates finger-pointing because everyone understands the relevance of the teams contributions. This provides employees with increased awareness of their interdependencies.

Empowerment

Offer guidance, but let your employees make the decisions when possible. They will feel valuable and it encourages them to learn more and grow. Inspire, don’t control. Encourage feedback, and communicate what is happening. People want to know their input matters and how they contribute to the company’s success.

What our businesses need today are managers who lead, inspire, and motivate employees to achieve business-wide goals. In the long-term, building solid relationships with employees builds an environment where they want to meet their goals and are not forced to do so.

Building Strong Manager-Employee Relationships originally appeared on Peter Anthony on September 20, 2012.

We recently talked about How Great Leaders Communicate and how they communicate in a variety of ways. Some people like charts, others like text, and some are visual.

Good leaders know there is more than one way to communicate and they incorporate all of these elements into presentations.

So how do they keep the audience listening, focused, and engaged?

Bruna Martinuzzi recently wrote an article on this very topic for Open Forum called “How to Keep Your Audience Focused on Your Presentation.”

The nine tips she offered to help deliver an engaging presentation are:

Remember the 10-minute Rule

Most presenters forget attention wanes after about 10 minutes. When creating your presentation, plan to have a strategic change every 10 minutes then use a different medium to present the next segment. Changes can be anything from showing a video clip, asking the audience a question, or telling a relevant story.

Don’t Forget Multimedia

Vision trumps all other senses. If we add a picture to a message, the message is loud and clear. Text-based slides are not effective in grabbing attention and maintaining it. You can get quality images from sites such as iStockphoto and Fotolia. You can also find a relevant video to help make your points. Multimedia will help break up your presentation into smaller chunks.

Put Bullets in Graphics

Back to the visual. Show some bullets on your slides in a visual way. Try and stand out from the crowd. Martinuzzi suggests using diagrams from sites such as Duarte, Slideshop, or Prezi.

Honor the Audience

Switch the focus of attention from you to them. A few ways to do this are asking questions designed to get a verbal response, give them a game or exercise, encourage them to ask questions, or ask polling questions about their opinions. This will perk up the audience and get their attention.

Don’t Just Lecture

Instead of lecturing, Martinuzzi suggests presenting part of your presentation in the form of a mind map. Draw it on a flipchart, and as you speak animate the mind map in your slide. There is also mind mapping software such as Matchware or Mindjet. Also, lighten up. Telling a few jokes. Being animated or just walking around the room will engage the audience and make them want to hear more.

Connect the Dots for the Audience

Help your audience understand where you’ve been and where you’re headed. If people can see the flow of your presentation, they will easily follow along. Using transitions such as “The first reason was… Now I’ll address the second reason” will help the flow of your presentation. Transitions such as “What does this mean for us?” or “The one thing to remember is…” will help the audience understand why they should care.

Have a Repertoire of Questions Use questions keep the conversation going. A few questions to use are “What led you to this conclusion?,” “How would you explain this?,” “How does this tie in with xyz,?” “Could you give me an example of what you mean?,” and “Tell me more.”

Slides are Not Your Speaking Notes

Remember, visual trumps auditory. A lot of speakers continue to use their slides, dense with text, and expect the audience to follow along as they speak.

Avoid Late Presentations

Presenting between 7 and 11 a.m. is the optimal time. If possible, avoid presenting right after lunch.

What tricks do you use during a presentation to keep your audience engaged?

Image: LeWEB12 via Flickr, CC 2.0

Nine Ways to Keep Your Audience Engaged During a Presentation originally appeared on Peter Anthony on September 19, 2012.

Poker can be very addictive for some and highly intelligent for others. In fact, there are several parallels found between success playing poker and running an auto industry business.

Like poker players, auto industry business leaders use logic and reason to make strategic decisions and they know how to calculate risk. They know how big the market is and how much they hope to conquer. A recent article in Fast Company talked about how to know if you’re the fish or the shark at the table. Here are the lessons they provided that business leaders can apply throughout their careers:

The Point of Control

In Texas Hold’em, you are dealt two cards you can see but your opponents can’t. Each player has control of the situation, they either decide to be in the hand or fold. As a business leader, you are in control at the start of any situation. You decide to do something or you don’t. Whether it’s responding to an email, seeing a sales rep, or hiring an employee, you either fold or stay in the hand.

The Power of Position

In poker, understanding the power position is the most important because you are able to make decisions after you’ve gathered information from your opponents. In business, when a competitor declares what they want first, you have information they don’t. In poker terms, you have the power of position. In business and in poker, it’s that ability to use your power of position regardless of the strength of your hand which separates the good players from the great ones.

To Make Decisions, Try Math

In poker and in business, calculating the odds and expectations are important. In poker you don’t have to be a math genius. Poker players base decisions on expected value. The calculation doesn’t ensure every hand will be profitable, however as long as a player plays hands with positive expectations and folds hands with negative expectations, they will be profitable in the long run.

Business leaders do something similar with decision trees. They assign each branch with probabilities and likely profits and choose the branch with the highest expected value.

Understanding and Adjusting to the Style of Competitors

Poker players watch and learn how their opponents play and make adjustments to how they are playing. Business leaders do the same. They both need to learn the comfort zone of their competitor so they can adjust to take advantage of their competitor’s style.

Keep Others in the Game

Poker players want as many opponents as possible when they have a great hand. They slowly put their chips in the pot and never bet so much their opponent would fold. They want to make the pot as large as possible. Then in the last round of betting, they put all of their chips in.

In business, they apply the same approach. When a business leader knows they have an exceptional product no competitor can match, they expand the market during the introduction and early growth phase by alluring competitors to invest in promotion and advertising. Once the pot is as large as possible, they put all of their chips in and go for market domination.

Look through the Eyes of Others

The most important lesson you can learn in poker, is looking at everything through your opponent’s eyes. They don’t make decisions on what they have in their hands, but rather what their opponent has. When a business leader sees through the eyes of the customers, competitors, their employees, and stakeholders, they discover the “truth in their error” or “the error in our truth” according to the Fast Company article. Once you’re able to see through the eyes of others, decisions become much easier.

What business lessons from playing poker would you add?

Image: BaileyRaeWeaver via Flickr, CC 2.0

Six Lessons Auto Industry Business Leaders Can Learn from Poker originally appeared on Peter Anthony on September 18, 2012.